Haeckel's Adapted 'Facts '

New Zealand Tablet, Volume XXXVII, Issue 19, 13 May 1909, Page 730

Haeckel's Adapted 'Facts '

There is no such thing as scientific prejudice. But there is -a very solid reality in the shape of the unscientific prejudice of (some) scientists. Both Darwin and Huxley expressed regret that, facts did not fit their theories. Huxley frankly expressed his disappointment on finding, in the course of his investigations into spontaneous generation (abiogenesis), that life always came from pre-existing life — that all the known facts of science show that the law of owwie vivum c vivo (every living thing comes from a living thing) admits of no exception. English scientists would not listen to Lavoisier's demonstration of the falsity of the old phlogiston theory of fire. Rotitledge, in his History of Science <p. 368) ,says : ' The English chemists — no doubt in some degree affected by the general British determination to oppose all French innovations — almost to a man clung to their beloved phlogiston. Cavendish published an able defence of the old theory, but, finding that the new opinions were nevertheless gaining ground, he relinquished chemical studies altogether. Priestly died in the phlogiston faith, and the other British chemists imitated Cavendish by throwing up the study in disgust."

Unscientific prejudice on the part of scientific men has, perhaps, never taken so discreditable a shape as that

which was given to'it by a chief standard-bearer of unbelief in our time, Professor Haeckel. His lliddle of the Universe was dissected in (among other works) that masterpiece of expository criticism, the Rev. John Gerard's The Old Itiddle and the Newest Answer, which should be in the hands of every one interested in this question. In the infancy of railways, Stevenson was asked what would happen if a locomotive came into collision with a cow. 'It wad be sac much the waur for the coo,' quoth Stevenson. When a fact comes into collision with a theory, sac much the waur for the theory. But Haeckel and some of his anti-Christian fellow-scientists shape and adapt and pad their ' fact ' to meet their theories. Rome of February 27 (p. 103) publishes an amazing- exposure in point. - The story runneth thus: In June, 1908, Haeckel (says Home) ' delivered a conference at Jena which he called " The Problem of Man," and which he illustrated by three plates proving the affinity between man and the mammifers. The first of these plates showed five skeletons of anthropomorphs, viz., man, gorilla, chimpanzee, orang, and gibbon ; the other two contained drawings of embryoivs of mammifers in their 'various stages of growth,- to show that at certain periods of development the human embryon differs'liardly at all from those of the other mammifers. What comes next makes very curious reading from many points of view. The following December a Dr. Brass boldly accused the Jupiter of Materialism with having forged his thunderbolts in favor of evolution. "Not only," he wrote in a statement which made a sensation in the scientific world, " not only has Professor Haeckel falsely represented various evolutive stages of man, the monkey, and other mammifers . . . but he has even taken from the work of a scientist the figure of a macaco, cut off its tail, and made a gibbon of it." This latter proceeding may sound like a burlesque — in reality it covers a scientific tragedy, which deserves a whole paragraph to itself in Horn c .

' The admirers of Haeckel held their breath waiting for their Master to come forth and pulverise the impudent Brass with a refutation of the ignominious charge of- doctoring the evidences of embriology. Fancy, then, their surprise and the amazement of men of science when they read the following admission over Haeckel's own name : "A small number (perhaps six or eight per cent.) of my numerous drawings of embryons are really falsified . . . that is to say, all those figures for -which the material possessed by us is so incomplete and insufficient that when we come to make an uninterrupted chain of the "evolutive stages, we. are obliged to fill the ■ vacancies by hypotheses, to reconstruct the missing members by comparative syntheses. After this confession, I should perhaps have to consider myself as annihilated. But I have the satisfaction that side by side with me in the prisoners' dock stand hundreds of fellow culprits, many of them being among the most trusted and esteemed biologists. The majority of figures, morphological, anatomical, histological, and embriological, which are circulated and valued in students' manuals and in reviews and works of biology, deserve in the same degree the charge of being falsified. None of them is exact, but all are more or less adapted, schematised, reconstructed." The professor then proceeds blandly to explain that he gerrymandered his data in order to render " accessible to the general public some truths which biologists have for a long time held as beyond all question to be admitted." Cruel judges have been known to give a man five years for similarly innocent enterprises on other documents. But that is not the point. Haeckel not only admits that he himself manufactures- his proofs, but he accuses practically all German biologists of his way of thinking of doing the same thing. If that is trlie', it " is the severest blow that has ever been dealt to the theory of evolution.'

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